You will often find a one or two line descriptor after a company name or product logo. This is the tagline, which may look simple to many but is not a cakewalk to create. The art of developing taglines for companies and brands needs creativity and out-of-the-box thinking so that you can create a lasting link between the words and your brand. An ideal company tagline should help you to add a new emotional and verbal ‘hook’, which in turn will help to heighten your value proposition.
A company tagline can appear in a wide range of media, including TV advertisements, websites, printed marketing materials, stationery, and the like. A tagline usually appears in close proximity with the company logo and/or name. In some cases, you may find it to be a part of logo so that the phrase and the logo’s graphic form a single visual unit.
Some people often ask if a tagline and a slogan are the same. Though there’s a thin line of difference between the two, one way of answering the question is to tell that while a tagline is linked to a brand or a company, a slogan is usually associated with a particular marketing campaign, product, or service.
While creating a company tagline, you can take your pick from the recognizable types like factual taglines, benefit taglines, egocentric taglines and abstract taglines. While factual taglines state a fact about the company or brand, benefit taglines communicate a benefit that the brand or company offers to its customers. Thus, for a computer and video gaming company, a factual tagline could be ‘Gaming since 2001’, while the phrase ‘Discover a world of interactive games’ can act as its benefit tagline.
The aim of egocentric taglines is to summarize what your company does, while abstract taglines try to tap into the emotional state of viewers by using abstract brand values or tangible customer benefits as abstruse metaphors. Thus, while Procter & Gamble’s tagline ‘Touching lives, improving life’ belongs to the category of egocentric taglines, the one of Nike – ‘Just do it’ or of McDonald’s – ‘I’m lovin’ it’ fall in the category of abstract taglines.
While creating your company tagline, you can toy with the idea of question taglines. Such taglines pose a question to the reader, with an underlying implication that the company asking the question can help with the answer in one way or another.
B2C and B2B taglines are other options that you can explore. While B2C taglines stress upon the ‘soft’ emotional connotations for their offerings to attract people with disposable, leisure or personal income and encourage them to make an optional purchase, B2B taglines focus on concrete benefits and aim to secure budgetary commitment for a commercial project.
So, depending on your objective, budget and target clientele, pick the type of company tagline that you would like to develop.